Welcome back Nirvy and Beauman!

Yes, at this point the votes are in and DCUO was a bust. I wasn't surprised given what I saw in beta. And trying to play it on a PC with mouse and keyboard will break every knuckle in your hands. I get carpel tunnel just thinking about it.

I hear ya.

I enjoyed the crafting system the most. Too bad we'll never see another crafting system as elegant and detailed as the one classic Galaxies had.

Where Darkfall went wrong is by being a PvP-centric game. You automatically cut out 90% of a potential audience of western gamers by doing that. Galaxies did it right by making the PvP entirely voluntary.

The sandbox is pretty much dead. Most people want to be given something to do. They want the guided experience. The market has spoken and that's that.

However, I can see in the future the possibility of sandpark games taking hold. Full-featured sandbox games that have themeparks situated inside of them. The cost of developing such a beast would most likely be daunting, but it may be where MMOs eventually end up. Or at least I hope so.

I may have to stand corrected on that, hehenep. Good catch. I withdraw my comment on the iTrials being rejected in my above post. It is currently an unknown. I'd LOVE it if the game saw an increase in financials post i20.

Still curious what people would do with the game to turn things around.

If I were all about PvP and wanted to avoid PvE 100%, I'd switch genres to FPS and MOBA.

Money-grubbing-MMO-sausage-factory has been rejected by the market. This is a good thing. The bad thing is people who like these games are losing their games. For the sake of those people I hope the titles get picked up by some other publisher.

OTOH I have been wishing for the closure of Star Trek Online. I'd like to see what a different developer and publisher would do with the IP, though most likely the IP would remain video game poison as Star Trek has always been more about the QQ than the pewpew. Still, I think better can be done.

Yeah, if you look at the financials post-iTrials the numbers continue to dwindle so the players have spoken and both Going Rogue and end game have been rejected. Unlike past years, the game finds a new all-time low in revenue with each new quarter. I feel bad for Paragon Studios because they have a QUALITY game in CoH. Yet the audience continues to shrink.

Okay, here is a hypothetical. The current lead for CoH is fired and you (by "you" I mean anyone reading this) are hired as their replacement. Your job: to turn the declining revenue around. What do you do?

Thanks for the tip, I think I'll try that.

It'd be nice if there was a slider you could set to allocate all the XP you get between your two classes so switching wasn't necessary. It does seem a bit clunky to have to do that, but you never know until you try so try I will.

I've been trying out this game again and have been enjoying it much more than a year ago. It seems there have been a lot of updates and changes in that time.

One thing bugs me, though. The Dual Class system. I'd really rather just play a straight-up Warrior, but it seems if you don't also grind up a second class you'll be pretty gimp compared to everyone else. Or that's what I assume.

Would it be too bad if I got Warriror to the level cap and then continued leveling up a second class?

I also find the ability to switch between primary and secondary class at will makes the character feel a bit less like a character and a bit more like a collection of skills. Maybe that's just me, though.

I've been working on a Warrior/Druid, but the Druid leveling has been getting me down. Perhaps I'll reroll to Warrior/Knight, but that would mean having to go through the human starter area that turned me off from the game before. Elven Island is much, much nicer IMHO.

Ah, well! Good game anyway.

Great review!

I haven't checked this forum for a long time, and when I happened to see your post was made this year (2011) I just had to check it out lol. Very well done.

It did bug me a little when CoV stopped being its own product and got folded into CoH. CoV is what brought me to the game and for it to no longer be a distinct entity is a bit sad to me, but necessary for the overall health of the game.

I've been enjoying this title myself recently. There were a couple of rough spots where it wasn't immediately obvious what to do next, but it all worked itself out and the density of quests (I'm a quester) is impressive.

They really should just allow diamond trades on the auction house. It would prevent ragequits by people who get scammed. But perhaps they intentionally cultivate such an untrustworthy atmosphere in diamond trades to discourage them without officially banning them.

I enjoy Allods overall a bit more, but Allods doesn't have the density of content and is PvP centric. Cash shop items are freely tradeable on the auction house, even.

You should check out City of Gaymers, a coalition of LGBT friendly guilds (Supergroups) in City of Heroes.

A lot of the people who post on these forums have the attitude of being tired of traditional MMO gameplay, but this is a tiny minority only and not the attitude of MMO players in general.

That said, what most of the dissatisfied players want to see is as close to a holodeck experience as possible. Fantastic worlds made real through incredible simulation. A complete pipe dream given current technology, but a near certainty in some far flung future.

Tried it and after about an hour of play, here's my first impressions:

Graphics: The graphics are definitely dated, but they aren't bad for their apparent age. In fact, they have a certain charm. The advantage of graphics like these is you get very solid performance and can even play on a low-end system or get crazy frame rates from a higher end.

Interface: Interface could use some work. There's no on-screen quest reminder, and no XP progress bar that I can find. After getting some useless items off my hot bar, the game put them back after I leveled up. :/ I definitely struggled with the interface the whole time.

Gameplay: The game is quest driven, which is great. It isn't always immediately apparent what to do next, but a bit of poking around got me going again without too much trouble. Combat is okay, but certain skills (I played a Warrior) will only activate if you're practically standing right on top of your target. You also have to manually face your target to attack it (something I don't really like, I prefer auto-facing). Game seems to be aiming at old-school MMO difficulty. My warrior was nearly killed by the goblins you break out of the boxes. You have to manually put yourself into and out of combat mode. I kept putting myself out of combat mode in the middle of a fight at first, but I started adjusting to the idea by the end of my hour.

Second Session?: Yes, I think I'll be logging in again at least one more time. The game has a certain charm to it, runs very smoothly, take up little room on the hard drive, and when I asked myself if I had fun at the end of my test hour the answer was, "Yes".

There isn't going to be a CoH 2. If there was one being worked on, why let people like Back Alley Brawler and Castle go?

Star Wars Galaxies had the feature first (I was a Helper in that game pre-NGE), but this is indeed a good improvement for the game.

Awesome review! I agree, the game is better than the greater MMO community will ever give it credit for. One of the most unique, smooth MMO experiences you can have.

You can't find a team in a game with 12 million players, you think LOTRO is the best PvE game around and EVE has the best community? What planet are you from and/or been smoking?

I actually feel bad for SOE if they're pinning their future hopes on Planetside, an IP that at its height was a niche title at best.

DCUO's studio's staff was cut by some 50% recently.

Another falls to CoH.

(Though I wish it didn't come at the cost of people's jobs).

I especially like the "webs down" phrase. It sounds funny.

"Webs down! Webs down!"